Everybody wants to be somebody fancy. Even if they're shy.

By accepting God's love for us, we fall in love with Him, and only then do we have the fuel we need to obey.

How many people have damaged their own lives by mistaking enablement for grace?

I don't wonder anymore what I'll tell God when I go to heaven when we sit in the chairs under the tree, outside the city........I'll tell these things to God, and he'll laugh, I think and he'll remind me of the parts I forgot, the parts that were his favorite. We'll sit and remember my story together, and then he'll stand and put his arms around me and say, "well done," and that he liked my story. And my soul won't be thirsty anymore. Finally he'll turn and we'll walk toward the city, a city he will have spoken into existence a city built in a place where once there'd been nothing.

If what you are doing is important, you will encounter resistance. If what you are doing isn't important it will be easy.

When you write, you're alone in a room. And when someone reads a book, they're alone in a room, too, usually. It's a really intimate exchange. And so people ask me where I get the boldness to talk about this or that, but I didn't feel like it required any sort of courage, because I was alone. Sometimes it feels weird for people to read it.

If you have a beautiful story, it has to have conflict. If you don't have conflict, it can't be a good story.